The People behind Online Voting

POLYAS has many faces. Twenty employees from different fields work in three cities to realise your online election.

In Kassel, enterprising spirit and cryptographic research unite; programmer, developer and IT experts work on the further development of our online voting system: POLYAS 3.0. Every day they improve the web service, develop new features, such as seeing the voter turnout in real time, and optimise the usability.

Our voting experts at POLYAS are located in Berlin and Switzerland. Defining terms like election regulations, ballot paper, and various vote-counting methods off the cuff is no problem for our experienced colleagues in Sales and Marketing. Our voting experts are in direct contact with our customers and explain the POLYAS election software as well as answer all questions that may arise. Further information about elections can be found in the online manual, for any interested party or customer who wishes to deepen their knowledge about voting.

POLYAS History

POLYAS is an old soul in a young start-up. In 1996 Wolfgang Jung developed the POLYAS voting system and conducted the first online election in Finland in the summer 1996 with 30,000 voters in three different languages. The success of the first secure online election led to an extended development at the software company Micromata (whose products include DHL tracking portal, online franking).

Our Progression at a Glance:

2012 - marks the spin-off of the two independent POLYAS subsidiaries in Berlin and St. Gallen

2014 - POLYAS offers a self-service online election for the first time

2015 - POLYAS celebrates three million online voters

2016 - in March the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) awards the POLYAS online voting software CORE version 2.2.3. the certificate for online security

Applied Mathematics and Online Voting

Our namesake is the Hungarian mathematician George Pólya (1887-1985) who taught in Zurich and at Stanford for years. Amongst other works, he wrote a series called "How to Solve it“ which is now considered core literature in heuristics (approaches to problem solving) and is still used today. In addition, his groundwork highly contributed to encryption technology and the calculation of proportional representation elections.

Following this tradition, we participate in research projects about security and easy usability of online elections. An example is the project “Flexi-Vote” in collaboration with the TU Darmstadt, which is funded by the German state of Hessen. As pioneers in online voting, market research is an essential part of our work at POLYAS. We develop online elections for the digital democratic present.